AMD 690 Chipset Update: More Power, More Performance

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Intro, Specs & Related Information

Back in February of this year, we took a look at the AMD 690 series chipset and praised it for its affordability, power efficiency, and strong performance relative to its competition. Since then, the 690 series chipset has gone on to be somewhat of a success for AMD with over 35 different motherboards based on various flavors the chipset currently and more on the way.

Not content with the status quo, engineers at AMD have taken the 690 series chipset and optimized it further through some BIOS and software level enhancements that result in marked performance gains in a number of situations and also introduce some new features. We've got a motherboard from Gigabyte on the test bed that feature the latest updates and thought we'd compare its performance to the unaltered board we evaluated when the chipset was first introduced in an attempt to see just how much the platform's performance has changed.

We've already gone into detail on the AMD 690 series chipset, so we won't cover many of the specifics again in this article. If you're unfamiliar with the platform, however, we suggest taking a look at our launch coverage for the necessary background information. And while you're at it, we recommend you check out these articles as well for details on the other components that make up AMD's current desktop PC platform: